As you can see, this partition starts 574 blocks in on the disk, or 574 * 512 = 293888 bytes in. Clearly, not 4K block aligned, as stated in the output of the command, and as shown in the math: 293888 / 4096 = 71.75.

Create a BSD scheme

Here, we create a scheme, into which we will create a partition and newfs it.

Hmm. Am I doing this wrong? Are these HDD not subject to a 4K alignment issue?

Sequential doesn’t count

Sequential sequence doesn’t count. “Alignment doesn’t matter much for sequential access, because the disk can coalesce requests. Only the first and last block will require a read-modify-write” – Dag-Erling Smørgrav